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The debate over technocracy and politics

by Robert Teitelman | Published November 21, 2011 at 11:29 AM

The pundits continue to chew over the issue of technocrats versus politicians, mostly over continuing European woes. Today, Paul Krugman in The New York Times offered a classically Krugmanesque solution to the technocrat question: redefinition. Technocrats that prove to be wrong are faux technocrats or "deeply impractical romantics." The only real technocrats turn out to be folks who agree with Krugman, who is never wrong. On Friday David Brooks in the Times pointed out an obvious irony: that euro technocrats like Mario Monti have taken power as the technocratic solution for a euro zone, created and driven by technocrats, has crumbled. Also on Friday, Michael Ignatieff in the Financial Times points out an equally obvious, if important, point: that technocrats require political legitimacy, particularly when they're ordering up a meal of austerity; that in the end you need both expertise and political skills. The European crisis represents a sort of blow to the idea that economics is the ultimate determinant for politics. This was originally a Marxist notion--the material (or economic) reality of the class struggle determined the intellectual superstructure--but it has since been diffused and diluted into the larger technocratic belief, which certainly held sway in Europe, that economics trumps politics, with its corollary that capitalism naturally leads to liberal democracy. This, in fact, is the chain of determinacies that led that Hegelian Francis Fukuyama to posit "the end of history."

The New York Times' Tom Friedman is a busy advocate of these kinds of deterministic ideas, with the fillip that technology shapes economic change--this is a crude rational-maximizing utilitarianism--which force elites to make bold decisions. In fact, Friedman increasingly seems to favor a form of democracy that is far more limited--far more technocratic--than the liberal democracies of either the U.S. or Europe. He's a big fan of the kind of control China exerts (so, by the way, is Fukuyama and fans of the Asian model, like the leadership in Singapore, who now tut over the problems of Western democracies), particularly on issues he believes are important like climate change, green technologies and competitiveness. In a column several weekends ago, Friedman sighed over India's chaotic infrastructure, a result he suggests that's part and parcel of its very messy democracy; India, he sighs, is no China. He then veers to the U.S., with its own political issues, and Europe. He blames the political breakdown on a deficiency of political leadership - too few "real leaders," that is, too few leaders willing to take steps Friedman knows is right--which he gingerly lays even at the feet of his much-favored Chinese. This produces the following remarkable sentence: "One wonders whether the Internet, blogging, Twitter, texting and micro-blogging, as in China's case, has made participatory democracy and autocracy so participatory, and leaders so finely attuned to every nuance of public opinion, that they find it hard to make any big decision that requires sacrifice. They have too many voices in their heads other than their own."

Where do we start with this? First, he seems to believe that "real leadership" can solve just about anything, from the euro-zone crisis to India's infrastructure to the drifting U.S. economy. He also seems to argue that the problems in democracies (and autocracies) around the world must have a common technological origin. After all, the world is flat. Leadership seems to be an attribute that transcends the political system--the ultimate answer, which, if you think about it for long, takes you to a very ugly place where the trains proverbially run on time. Second, Friedman's realization that even China--the technocracy par excellence--has some knotty problems seems to unhinge him. If I parse this sentence correctly--it's a challenge--he's suggesting that autocracy and democracy are both crumbling under the hammer blows of social media. In fact, leaders "finely attuned to every nuance of public opinion" mean well but are overloaded. Even autocracies (read China) are too participatory, too democratic and open. Is he out of his mind? Twitter and Facebook are bringing the world down? Is he suggesting that the Indians can't build roads because their leaders are overwhelmed by social media? That corruption, incompetence, a colonial legacy, not enough money and too many cows might not play roles? That the euro zone is imploding because leaders suddenly realize what people want in all its destabilizing diversity? That President Obama is not displaying adequate leadership on energy and climate change because he's swamped in tweets? That regime breakdown in the Middle East is a matter of social media, not corruption, incompetence, rising food prices and unmet expectations?

Let's step back. Political systems, particularly democracies, are a) always messy and b) always thigh-high in woe. They demand compromise, tolerance and often proceed in mysterious ways. They move either too slowly or too quickly for the technocratic set, which includes the punditocracy. But democratic systems have profound strengths: They are extremely sensitive to public stresses and strains. They create a sense of legitimacy, unless they're a complete sham (and inequality undermines legitimacy). Over the long run they are flexible and changeable. They are necessary to surmount crises and move on. Granted, the state of the world right now is particularly fraught, though I can think of many periods in the past when it was worse. If there's anything to be said about our hyped-up media (including social media), it's that it tends to amplify, even exaggerate, the problems without articulating the solutions; and that it allows those of a particular persuasion to only listen to like-minded souls. Credulous souls like Friedman who believe in the ultimate wisdom of technocrats tend to panic when their wisdom proves hollow. And if there is one thing to be said about the wisdom of technocrats, particularly those in the economic wing, it's that events since 2008 have effectively undermined their authority.

The big issue here is the tension between technocracy and democracy--an issue Max Weber outlined a century ago when experts began forming large government bureaucracies to cope with an exploding private economy and increasing demands on the state. The complexity and challenge of modernity has outstripped not only the ability of ordinary citizens to understand many issues, it has overmastered the very technocrats who oversee its operation. From globalization to financial regulation to climate change to the macroeconomy to European integration, the issues are confounding on both a political and technocratic basis. Mistakes have been made. But even the exploration and identification of those mistakes is tough. Some of these issues resemble the difficulties of pharmaceutical companies that, having profited from classes of drugs like antibiotics and the heart drugs, now confront more intractable challenges, like cancer or Alzheimer's. Pharma CEOs today aren't necessarily better or worse than in the past; the problems are just more difficult.

The public, of course, doesn't care; it just wants answers. The danger here is that technocratic failure will produce political breakdowns in which all authority becomes suspect, and a further descent into fantasy and magical thinking. We are seeing symptoms of that throughout the developed world, where populist movements are demanding simple answers to complex problems. This was certainly the case with the Tea Party, with its fantasies of the American founding and its nostalgia for a past that never existed. Conservative belief in automatic mechanisms--the market, the gold standard, balanced-budget amendments--represents an attempt to transcend both politics and technocracy. Then there's Occupy Wall Street, which combines an experiment in direct democracy with a mass of issues that mostly belong to the school of wishful thinking. The faith offered up by Nicholas Kristof in the Sunday Times that, say, inequality can now be tackled because OWS brought it to the public's attention is both an exaggeration--it's been the subject of concern for a while--and simplistic: trying to create a more equal economy involves all sorts of unknowns, tough tradeoffs and unintended consequences. Larry Summers in Monday's FT suggests just how foundational inequality is, arguing that it traces its origins in the rise of the knowledge economy and globalization. Summers, rarely without an answer, notes "that there are too few good ideas in the current political discourse," and offers up a few, all of which might help only marginally.

The faith in technocracy, corporatist or statist (Friedman or advocates for the Asia model rarely make a distinction), is another example of this escape from an increasingly complex reality into fantasy; Krugman is right about that, though he fails to see that a kind of romantic will to power is an essential thread of the Faustian technocrat. Democracy has proven itself to be weak and feckless. Therefore, let's give control to the experts. In fact, what has failed is both technocracy and democracy, expertise and political legitimacy, like spouses in a bad marriage. It has little to do with leadership. It has everything to do with believing that one or the other is the total answer--failing to see how they're intertwined, both supporting and limiting each other, forcing a sense of realism. Divorce is not an option. - Robert Teitelman

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